The tremendous growth in demand for wireless telecommunication services in recent years has cultivated an environment where service providers can afford to select those customers that satisfy stringent credit requirements and deemed to be the lowest risk from the prospective of the provider. A natural byproduct of this situation is that many customers are rejected on the basis of their credit histories and are therefore denied service. This large market of potential customers has been keenly courted by the wireless industry through the concept of having subscribers prepay prior to services rendered to them. Prepayment, as it seems, satisfies all parties involved: allaying the concerns of the industry regarding due payment for services rendered and customers are able to obtain service that they would otherwise not be able to. Other reasons that prepaid access may be attractive include the ability for customers to limit usage i.e. control bills and the fact that many providers require long term commitments which may not suit customers desiring more short term or transient programs.
Not surprisingly, prepayment systems have been increasingly popular among service providers with many expeditiously being put into operation to obtain the additional revenue generated from more subscribers. Many of these prior art prepayment systems are self-contained units that are coupled to the mobile switching center (MSC) of the wireless network. In a typical prepayment procedure, customers are required to purchase a prepaid card containing credit that entitles them to a limited amount of calling time. The prepaid cards purchased by customers may be of a disposable variety i.e. only used once or may be reused by paying to replenish the credit stored therein.
A major disadvantage of the prior art prepayment methods as described is that the prepayment systems only work with the network it is attached to and thus does not permit subscribers to roam to other networks. A further complication is that various networks may be employing incompatible prepayment systems that do not support the prepaid subscribers of other networks. At present there exists no prevailing standard for communication between the various prepayment systems in use by different networks. A further disadvantage with the prior art method is that the subscriber is required to go out and purchase a prepaid card which is inconvenient and time consuming.
In view of the foregoing, it is an objective of the present invention to provide a convenient method that permits prepaid subscriber credit information to be accessible by any compatible wireless network to permit prepaid roaming.